Morning Nibbles

For a morning roundup, this is looking very much like one of those dastardly Mouseketeer Club intros. So I’ll cop and fess that, despite the fact that while these are all links worthy of your attention, the motivation, the raison d’etre as it were, for this post is to tell the world that yes I am indeed alive and to fulfill the basic obligation, which is at least one post a day. The idea being that if I were to miss a day, you (the audience and concerned friends) would conclude that there was something wrong: that I had jumped off a ledge or checked into a monastery or registered as a Republican. Of course, if one were to simply declare one’s self alive, this would not be of much interest (“I’m alive! Boo yah! How you like them apples?”), as it would not fulfill the basic requisite, which is to cover literary happenings or things of related interest. So instead I’ll conclude as gracefully as I can and report that I’m quite, quite, quite busy (nothing wrong, mind you, just highly diligent!) and I’ll try to check in with something thoughtful later, don’t know where, don’t know when.

2 Comments

“SD: What I am thinking about is the several friends I have who can’t get books published—good books. And the excuse is always, “Fiction isn’t selling.”

RB: That sounds like bullshit. If the level of activity and energy on the internet translates into anything, then you wouldn’t think that. The economy of it is no doubt ridiculous and the way the publishers are trying to do business is silly, but I don’t think that there is a diminishing audience. People may be buying less but I don’t think they reading less.”

–Yes! I just said the same thing a few days ago in a comment section at my blog. I can’t stand the “blame the people and not the publishers” mantra in existence today, at least IMO this mantra is often used.

I think the reading public and publishers are probably both responsible for the (IMO) overall shitty “state” of publishing today, but publishers are much more responsible, though I mostly mean the larger publishers. Some really good small(er) presses seemingly are trying to make up for the overrated overpriced mediocre-to-crappy writing too many large publishers are regularly putting out.